Category: blogs

strike two

oh my, the “sassy” one strikes again. how boring. pwedeng di na lang patulan pero on second thought, why not, lalo na’t baka isipin niyang tama siya porke walang response.

having trained in psychology, i cannot but read “tyranny of the insecure” as a demonstration of freud’s “defense mechanisms” (projection and intellectualization, in particular) – the product of a mind feeling “undermined” and “threatened” by criticism. in effect most of what she says applies to herself mismo, if she would only see.

infinitely more interesting, actually, is that she manages – by sticking to generalities – to steer away from the language issue she raised against ka amado’s mga ibong mandaragit, as though that’s all been settled in her favor and there is nothing more to say. (it’s called “being in denial,” another defense mechanism.)

in fact, nothing’s settled in her favor. contrarily, the sentiment is remarkably, wonderfully, pro-mandaragit, such as jaywalker‘s comment to salamat, “sassy”:

This is a classic caseof one spitting against the wind……… naturally it goes smack in ones’ face, lol. . . . So now we know, to increase the sales of Filipiniana books all one has to do is to get sassy to read it, enough for her to rant about it and voila… success.”

salamat, “sassy”

dahil sa iyo, sold out daw ang Mga Ibong Mandaragit ni Ka Amado! ang saya naman!

at dahil sa iyo, merong nang ibongmandaragit.com dedicated to reading and blogging on the book, chapterby chapter. ang saya talaga!

challenge of the blogs

must read: talk about kettles calling the pots black by dean jorge bocobo, where he takes on media guru luis teodoro, who deserves it for not finding anything good to say about blogs except that they pose a challenge to mainstream media, and who therefore advises journalists to:

. . . go into blogging to set examples . . . the principles of journalism should apply.”

ateneo communications professor chay hofilena agrees:

There should be verification and fairness even if it’s an opinion piece. There should be an effort to get the other side no matter how little the space you allot.”

ahahaha. what do they think they’re doing? they want to change the blogosphere, that’s what. they want bloggers writing like their mga alaga, i suppose, who only report both sides of a story, and who do not feel too strongly or care deeply enough about issues (for lack of reading and research?) as to make the mistake of pushing an opinion or taking a stand, oh no, that’s a no-no.

but that’s precisely what’s so great and radical about blogging – the unlimited space for opinions and ideas that are not welcome in mainstream media because, as bocobo tells us in no uncertain words:

Next to the government itself, of which the Main Stream Media are virtually a part, I cannot think of a more corruption-ridden, unethical, unprofessional, disingenuous and commerce-driven bunch than the Philippines Main Stream Media. Hiding behind veils of objectivity to hide prejudice, ideology, selfish agendas and vested interests, using innuendo, libelous and scurrilous attacks, whilst piously defending press freedom, what right do these kettles have to call the pots black and then to charge for it.

“Hahaha! At least when the bloggers use these same tactics they aren’t hypocrites about it and expect everyone else to bow down before their “codes of professional ethics”–which in our Main Stream Media are followed more in the exception than in the rule.”

my advice to journalists who would-be political bloggers: plunge in, get the hang of it, get into the loop, persevere, but don’t expect special treatment. like bocobo says:

Bring your ethics. Bring your standards. Bring your professionalism. Bring your Mama! But what really matters here is whether your ideas can compete with others and win! Your bandwidth is my bandwidth. My Liberty is your Liberty. Leave your stupidities and inanities at the door, or bring them along and wallow with the rest of the warthogs (which is allowed!). Here we are equals, and you’ve just come to the party a little late. Now, there’s a place at the table for everyone, but don’t expect a high place and automatic respect just coz you’re so used to one way conversations and call yourself some fancy name that really means nothing to most of us.”

what if, instead of trying to change the blogosphere teodoro found ways to raise the bar for journalism, raise the level of thinking and analysis through reading lists and interdisciplinary crash courses on history, politics, economics, environment, world trade and the like.

instead of putting down blogs, which is so crabmentality, yuck, traditional media should be upgrading and rising to the challenge of the blogs.

sassy: aiming high, hitting low

imagine. complaining about the tagalog of amado v. hernandez in mga ibong mandaragit [now required high school reading, thank goodness, being a sequel to rizal’s fili].

that’s sassy? that’s stupid. and lazy. and, really, anti-filipino, i.e., anti everything that filipino stands for.

clearly connie v. has no love for the filipino language. she takes pride in speaking it fluently, but she can’t be bothered to write it or read it or value it, unless it’s something simple and easy, blog-easy LOL and, maybe, illustrated, para hindi boring? kidstuff, in other words. what a value to pass on to her daughters.

clearly she’s never read the pasyons or rizal or bonifacio in tagalog. that’s even more different from the tagalog, ok, filipino, we write today. but you just have to concentrate a little more than usual, and yes, a good dictionary helps, it’s certainly worth the effort, expands the mind no end.

anyway, by the way, what’s going on ba? why does connie v. actually think she deserves to have it easy and simple? what’s with this sense of entitlement? hubris? is she just so full of herself?

for more here’s katrina, who’s with academe (on and off) and into philippine lit with a passion:

i’m the last person who will look down on what people enjoy reading, nor will i insist that you must read certain books in order for you to be called “literary”. i will insist though that anyone who dares to diss any form of literature, particularly philippine lit, should have more to go on than just his or her superficial notions of taste and literature, and in this case, language.

this is exactly what connie veneracion did in her manilastandardtoday column last Tuesday. she complained about the difficult Tagalog of Amado V. Hernandez’s Mga Ibong Mandaragit, and in the end questioned its inclusion in her daughter’s school curriculum. obviously exasperated that neither she nor her husband could read this Filipino classic, she went on and on about literature and creativity, about writers making things more difficult on purpose, about the simplicity of Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and how it was so easy to understand, and how there are Filipino writers like Jay David who do write in a Filipino that’s easy to read. in the end, she blamed Ka Amado – and i imagine any other writer – for the difficult writing she had, and failed, to endure.

the question really, is this: why was she not blaming herself?

when we have difficulty reading literature in Filipino, and then have the gall to complain about it, we must should be ashamed. the question here isn’t whether or not a writer purposely made his or her writing difficult – how do you even prove purpose? the question is, why exactly you yourself, as a Filipino, cannot sit through a Filipino classic novel without complaining about its language. in the case of veneracion, Ka Amado was to blame for his kind of writing, because look! Hemingway and Jay David are so much more easy to read. never mind that Hemingway writes in a different language altogether, and David is of a different generation and therefore uses a different kind of Filipino in his writing.

it seems to be lost on veneracion that these are false comparisons, based only on her personal taste and range of reading capabilities, both of which are infinitely problematic in its insistence on simplicity and ease in reading, because literature of any kind is so much more than these.

whose requirement is it that literature be easy, anyway? isn’t this different for every person? popular literature such as David’s, for example, will be a difficult read for a Filipino who has English as a first language, for example, or someone who doesn’t use Manileño Tagalog; in the same way that Old Man and the Sea will not be an easy read for someone who isn’t familiar with Hemingway’s kind of English.

the language of literature – even when it seems easy – never is. in truth, if anyone imagines Hemingway to be easy, then in reality they do not understand him. in fact, the last thing i imagine any writer would want to hear is that his or her work was “easy” or “simple”, as neither is synonymous with “well-written” or “life changing” or even just “ang galing mo magsulat!”.

which points to another glaring fact about veneracion: she isn’t even aware of her own limitations as a reader of all these texts, and how what she had to say against Mga Ibong Mandaragit wasn’t a simple case of language, or the dichotomies that have come out of her discussion: creative writing versus popular writing, the classics versus the contemporary (as the discussion in her blog has pointed out), high art versus low art.

none of these dichotomies are easy to pin down, and the last one’s particularly difficult for a text such as Mga Ibong Mandaragit. yes, Ka Amado’s status as a Tagalog classic that’s required reading makes him “high art” in a sense, but contextualize that in the continued dominance of philippine writing in english (and here i speak not just of literature but of magazines and blogs as well), and the notion of high and low become problematic.

in fact, a little reading would tell veneracion that the presence of these Filipino classics (Mga Ibong Mandaragit, Florante at Laura, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo) in our school curriculum is anything but an effort at making it more difficult for our daughters (and apparently their parents) to appreciate literature. reading some history would’ve told veneracion that in truth, the presence of these Filipino classics in the curriculum is the product of a continuous struggle to wrest our classrooms from the throes of a western(ized) syllabus/reading list. and yes, save our children from colonial mentality – for good measure, as apparently some parents are beyond saving.

all the issues veneracion raises about literature in this country are complex, none of them are easy. what was wrong was that her discussion went beyond simple. it was simplistic. and unjust.

this is revealed even more by veneracion’s assessment of Jose Garcia Villa and his comma poems which she calls “crap” (in her blog she calls it “lokohan”). my question of course is “relative to what?” because if you are forced to respect ee cummings for his experiments in form, then why not the same respect for Villa? and let’s say you don’t care for cummings either, then at the very least, Villa – and any other writer for that matter – deserves respect for writing the way he did in the context of Philippine poetry that had yet to get it, or do anything like it.

i wish veneracion had better literature teachers when she was growing up, then maybe at the very least, she would have the words to actually praise the literature she likes other than saying they’re “easy” and “simple”; she’d also have better sense than to simply say that the works she doesn’t like – and can’t understand – are crap.

because no text, no literature, no writer, least of all Ka Amado and Mga Ibong Mandaragit, deserves that.”